http://mdedwards.typepad.com
tetsudoh@gmail.com

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
http://www.medialens.org/
http://www.flatearthnews.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
http://unspeak.net/more-reviews/
http://www.politicalcompass.org/extremeright

We do not have a genuine democracy in Britain today. We have an overwhelmingly Authoritarian-Right Parliament which leaves millions of people entirely disenfranchised, marginalised and unrepresented.

Part of that tyranny is an overwhelmingly corporatised and oligopolised media system that is also characterised by Authoritarian-Right domination. It is not open to a full range of opinions and views. It has also bombarded us with constant distractions, for example a vapid, vacuuous and venal 'celebrity' world without any kind of substance or quality or relevance to our daily lives.

Whether it is millions of unemployed people hidden away as a result of massaged 'statistics', or millions of households waiting for social housing, or people being killed whilst in police custody, or asylum seekers and immigrants being abused and bullied in horrific detention centres, the real long-term costs of the so-called 'bailouts', the real size of the global Ponzi scheme(s) that led to the so-called 'bailouts', the failures of local councils and absurdly overpaid chief executives, the calamitous results of everything from the tax credit system to ruinous PFI schemes to the 'tripartite regulatory' system brought in by James Gordon Brown, the abuse of non-domicile tax status and unregulated tax havens, the pervasive 'gender pay gap' which means that women are overwhelmingly rewarded for their work far less than men, the extent and cost of bullying in the workplace, the desecration of our National Health Service and its replacement by a privatised NHS PLC, the incarceration of innocents in prisons and mental hospitals as well as incarceration through tagging and curfews, the rapid extinction of species and the accelerating vandalism and destruction of ecosystems, marked declines in bee populations, the peak in North Sea oil and in global oil supplies, peak uranium, peak bluefish tuna, the public health effects of past and present nuclear weapons tests, the real long-term public health of accidents in the nuclear power industry (eg Chernobyl and Three Mile Island), the field of 'bioethics' where regulation is light years behind the pace of scientific discovery (for instance in terms of cloning, robotics, DNA manipulation, making cats that light up in the dark etc), the disintegration and privatisation of our transport network, the real long-term costs of the Olympic Games, levels of material and educational social inequality not seen for several decades if not centuries, the full extent of poverty and fuel poverty amongst disadvantaged groups such as those forced to live on the meagre state pension, the criminalisation of the innocent (eg 'protesters') and the failure to arrest the real criminals (eg 'politicians' who have robbed us of our money), the absence of full and independent inquiries and investigations into events such as the 7th July 2005 London bombings or the death of Dr David Kelly in 2003, the long-term politicisation and abuse of the civil service, the destruction of the rule of law and the separation of powers between executive, legislative and judiciary, the erosion and elimination of our rights and liberties under the absurd and oxymoronic rubric of the 'war on terror', what is really going on in Afghanistan, or the real costs of the absurd, ludicrous, unnecessary, vile, disgusting, appalling, horrific, repugnant and repulsive renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system (up to £75 billion of our taxes) or anything else of prime importance, the real stories in Britain today are overwhelmingly suppressed in favour of tat and mindrot.

Let's have a media in Britain that interrogates power rather than colluding with it. Furthermore, let's have a media that is capable of giving voice to opinions and views from all of the population rather than just a small, elitist section of it.







DEMOCRATIC FREE PRESS: THE EXPERIMENT

I am going to conduct an experiment to see how receptive the British media is.

I will offer stories to various different media sources based on the following Facebook group:

1,000,000 PEOPLE TO VOTE AGAINST NEW LABOUR, CONSERVATIVES, LIB DEMS + BNP:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=74759451667

I will also be asking to read, see or hear symposia on the mess we are in and how we rebuild from it by people that I admire. They include the people I am putting together as my own personal 'Fantasy Cabinet' of Ministers which currently includes Vicky Gray, Dave Hampton, Margaret Haywood, Tony Juniper, Dr.Caroline Lucas, Joanna Lumley, Paul Moore, Craig Murray, Marina Pepper, Dr Richard Taylor, Terry Waite and Benjamin Zephaniah. The list is at http://mdedwards.typepad.com.

I am also interested in hearing from other people with wisdom, experience, intelligence, skill, integrity and judgment in a number of different fields. For your personal Fantasy Cabinet, please post your ideas to the following:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=62004532668&topic=8144

The progress of my experiment will be incrementally updated at the following discussion thread:

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=87620104839&topic=9051

Please try similar experiments of your own, and please add details of them to that discussion thread. (read less)

http://mdedwards.typepad.com
tetsudoh@gmail.com

http://www.indexoncensorship.org/
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
http://www.medialens.org/
http://www.flatearthnews.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
http://unspeak.net/more-reviews/
http://www.politicalcompass.org/extremeright

We do not have a genuine democracy in Britain today. We have an overwhelmingly Authoritarian-Right Parliament which leaves millions of people entirely disenfranchised,... (read more)